Another cog in the culture industry

January 27, 2015

I recently changed my ISP from Earthlink to Verizon. Because I had been with Earthlink for over twelve years, my Earthlink homepage contained a lot of material that I decided to move to my Typepad blog (which is where you are now, of course). But some of that mass of material was also out of date, and so I've been going through old files in order to decide what to keep and what to throw into the digital trashcan.

As I was revising my CV, I was reminded of my first academic publication, which was a review of the Reclam edition of Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forth as Science. The odd thing about my review was that I wrote it in German. Consequently, my first academic publication was in German, even though English is my native language. There's a little story behind how this happened, and I thought that you might enjoy reading it. So here it is.

When I was living and studying in Munich, I shared an apartment with a German political philosophy student who was also the co-editor of the HfP-Zeitung, which I guess you could call the once-a-semester student magazine of the Hochschule für Politik. (Or at least that's how I remember it. I apologize if I've misremembered.) He had a copy of Kant's Prolegomena for review, and since I too was a philosophy student, but one who specialized in German idealism, he asked me to write a short review.

Well, I'd never written much German prose, yet I figured that I could give it a go. By that stage of my graduate school career I'd read Kant's Prolegomena in English many times, of course, but I first had to read it in German to write the review. Now I was doing this slightly two hundred years after the publication of the book. So my job wasn't to say whether or not it was a good book. It was written by Kant in the 1780s, which means that it's of tremendous philosophical importance, regardless of what one thinks of it. So, instead, I wrote a few paragraphs trying to explain some of the basic ideas in clear, simple language. (Which wasn't all that hard to do, since my German prose was itself fairly simple.)

Naturally, my prose was imperfect, but my roommate was kind enough to correct my mistakes (which he had to do anyway, since he was co-editor of the magazine). My review was then published in the winter semester issue of the 89/90 academic year, and so there I was with a little piece in German that also happened to be my first academic publication.

My review covered slightly more than one page of the magazine. I've scanned the two pages and uploaded the images below. I erased another review that appeared at the bottom of the second page, just in case the author (my roommate the co-editor, in fact) doesn't wish it to be reprinted without his permission.

It was really not much more than a bit of fun, but it was a worthwhile exercise that no doubt contributed to improving my German, which, after all, was why I was studying in Germany in the first place.

If you would like to download the review as a single PDF (1.3 MB), then click on this link.

December 02, 2011

In mid-2007 I agreed to work as one of the translators of an anthology of the work of the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. These things take time to see the light of day, and so only recently has the book been published by Brandeis Universty Press.

The book is entitled Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible and includes a wide selection of Mendelssohn's work from 1769 to 1786. Michah Gottlieb edited, introduced, and annotated the book. Elias Sacks did the translations from Hebrew, and I did the new translations from German. I also made some suggestions for slightly revising the excerpts from Allan Arkush's 1983 translation of Mendelssohn's Jerusalem.

My new translations make up roughly forty percent of the book as a whole. This page will provide you with the full table of contents. I translated selections 1-3, 5, 6-8, 10, 11-13, 15-16, and 20-25.

June 16, 2010

Yolanda Estes and I recently published a book entitled J.G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute (1798–1800). It's a collection of translations and commentary devoted, as the title indicates, to Fichte and the atheism dispute of 1798-1800. I did the translations, whereas Yolanda wrote the introduction for the book as a whole as well as the annotations for the translated essays and documents.

Much of the translated material appears in English for the first time, and so I think that our book is something of an event in German idealism studies. Unfortunately, the book is rather expensive. Consequently, I figure that most sales will be to libraries. So if you happen to frequent a scholarly library, I would appreciate your recommending the book to the people who do the purchasing.

Right now I can't say whether or not there will be a paperback edition. Yolanda would certainly like for there to be one, so that she can assign the book to her students. We'll certainly do our best to see that a paperback edition comes out at some point in the future. But for the time being the book will only be available in hardback.

By the way, if you read the book and notice any typographical errors, please send them to me. You'll find my email address on my "about me" page.

October 22, 2009

Thomas Frank revisits Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." He deftly applies Hofstadter's essay to some of our present-day political turbulence.

Unfortunately, Hofstadter's original, archived article is only available to subscribers of Harper's Magazine. As far as I can tell, this is the closest that you can get to it without a subscription. But I noticed that what seems to be the full text of the article has been posted here.

Toward the end of Frank's article you'll see that he mentions that Hofstadter also referred to the right-wing paranoid as a pseudo-conservative. This put me in mind of Theodor Adorno's analysis of pseudo-conservatism in The Authoritarian Personality. And so I wonder whether or not Hofstadter was familiar with this book. I assume that he was.

You can find Adorno's main discussion of pseudo-conservatism in Part IV, chapter XVII, section B, subsection 4, which, at least in my edition of The Authoritarian Personality, begins on page 675. Here's a quotation from page 676 to get you started: "The pseudoconservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition."

Update - November 30, 2015: Good news! Hofstadter's entire article is now available for free in the Harper's archive.

August 25, 2009

From time to time over the past few years I've mentioned that Yolanda Estes and I have been working on a book about the German philosopher J.G. Fichte. It's been a long haul, but it now looks as if J. G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute (1798-1800) will be published in March 2010. Our book is a collection of translations and commentary devoted (as the title plainly indicates) to Fichte and the atheism dispute, a pivotal event not only in Fichte's philosophical career but also in the history of German idealism as a whole.

The complete manuscript is at the press, and so right now Yolanda and I are working through the production process. This page on the Ashgate website will give you more information about the book and its contents.

In an earlier post to my blog I published a review of Simon Blackburn's Truth: A Guide. I mentioned that I had written the review for a journal, but that I had withdrawn my manuscript after it was butchered by an amateurish editor. Instead of letting my work go to waste, I posted the review to my blog. I figured that someone out there might be interested in what I had to say about Blackburn's book.

Since I'd like to get even more mileage out of my review, I'm writing this post in order to lead people to my review from another angle. In chapter 4 Blackburn takes on the issue of Nietzsche's alleged relativism. I was rather unhappy with this portion of the book because I consider it unlikely that Nietzsche was a relativist. It's not just blatantly obvious that he wasn't a relativist, but a bit of reflection leads, in my considered opinion, to the conclusion that he didn't subscribe to relativism. My review briefly explains my reasoning.

If you're reading Nietzsche and would like to learn more about this topic, go to my review and scroll down to my discussion of chapter 4.

June 22, 2009

A couple of years ago I was asked to write a review of Simon Blackburn's Truth: A Guide. I won't mention the name of the journal that contacted me, so I'll just say that it isn't one that usually deals with philosophical subjects. I diligently went to work and submitted two drafts of my review, only to have the second draft butchered by an amateurish editor. At the time I was so busy with more pressing work that I simply withdrew my manuscript. I had better things to do.

But like any author, I hate to let my work go to waste. Consequently, I thought that I should post the review to my blog. After all, someone out there might take an interest in it. Please note that my pagination refers to the hardback edition.

If you're so inclined, you can download the review as a PDF file (14 KB).

June 29, 2004

Because I'm a regular reader of the print-edition of The New Republic, I read this article by Anne O'Donnell (subscription-only, unfortunately) long before I found it on-line. (In fact, this post encouraged me to find the web version in order to link to it.) I mention O'Donnell's article because it alerted me to the lecture that Helen Vendler recently gave as the 2004 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities.

Professor Vendler's lecture is available on-line. Her topic is the humanities, in particular the humanities as they are practiced at today's colleges and universities. Professor Vendler addresses various interesting questions throughout her lecture: What are the humanities to study? What value do they possess? How are they to influence students? And so on. She answers her questions via readings of several poems by Wallace Stevens.

Since I have devoted my adult life to the study of the humanities, I was glad that Professor Vendler discussed them in a public forum. (By the way, the Jefferson Lecture is sponsored by the NEH.) Prominent academics with a public profile don't do enough to defend and promote what they do for a living. So that's all to the good.

But Professor Vendler makes several remarks about philosophy (which is my discipline) that I find puzzling. I'll quote from her first three paragraphs and then say something about them.

Here are the first two paragraphs in their entirety:

When it became useful in educational circles in the United States to group various university disciplines under the name "The Humanities," it seems to have been tacitly decided that philosophy and history would be cast as the core of this grouping, and that other forms of learning--the study of languages, literatures, religion, and the arts--would be relegated to subordinate positions. Philosophy, conceived of as embodying truth, and history, conceived of as a factual record of the past, were proposed as the principal embodiments of Western culture, and given pride of place in general education programs.

Confidence in a reliable factual record, not to speak of faith in a reliable philosophical synthesis, has undergone considerable erosion. Historical and philosophical assertions issue, it seems, from particular vantage points, and are no less contestable than the assertions of other disciplines. The day of limiting cultural education to Western culture alone is over. There are losses here, of course--losses in depth of learning, losses in coherence--but these very changes have thrown open the question of how the humanities should now be conceived, and how the study of the humanities should, in this moment, be encouraged.

After these introductory remarks, she formulates her proposal in her third paragraph:

I want to propose that the humanities should take, as their central objects of study, not the texts of historians or philosophers, but the products of aesthetic endeavor: architecture, art, dance, music, literature, theater, and so on.

I'm all for the study of the arts, which is why I repeatedly taught courses in aesthetics when I was still a professor. It's what Professor Vendler says about the status of philosophy that puzzles me so.

But I'll start with a couple of minor quibbles. First, to say that philosophy embodies truth doesn't really distinguish it from history or most of the other humanistic disciplines, since, presumably, like philosophy, they aim at producing truths rather than falsehoods. I guess, though, that she means something suitably high-minded: Truth with a capital 'T', as Richard Rorty might say.

Second, Professor Vendler's observation that historical and philosophical assertions are made from particular viewpoints is obviously true. No one has ever really argued otherwise, although many historians and philosophers have thought  rightly, if you ask me  that they could overcome their own particular particularity, if you will, in their efforts to produce knowledge claims of various sorts. The point is to work within the boundaries of our fallibility, individually or collectively, in such a way that we minimize the risk of error and maximize the possibility of arriving at the truth. All of us do this all the time.

The real problem here, though, is that Professor Vendler seems to be asserting that the particularity of the viewpoint from which a claim to knowledge issues is itself a sufficient ground for challenging the view. This is the sort of mediocre epistemology that one finds all too frequently outside of philosophy departments.

The finitude of the person making a claim to knowledge is never a sufficient ground for challenging what that person has said, because such finitude characterizes everyone who makes a claim to knowledge. A challenge has to be based on reasons that directly address what has been claimed. Airy observations of the post-modernist sort that we are all historical beings living in a particular place and time give us at best a motive to suspect what others say. By themselves, though, they aren't objections. Historical tales aren't sufficient for undermining someone else's claim or arguments. If they were, then nothing would be worthy of belief.

I'll get off my anti-postmodernist hobbyhorse  Whoa! Steady there!  and move on to what really bothers me about Professor Vendler's lecture. After all, what I've just discussed is found in her brief opening remarks, and so perhaps none of it was meant too earnestly. We might think of it as a bit of theoretical throat-clearing.

Therefore, let's look at her remarks about philosophy. Here's my question: Since when was philosophy one of the two central objects of humanistic study in our colleges and universities?

Professor Vendler wants to shift the focus from history and philosophy to "the products of aesthetic endeavor." Well, as regards philosophy, that ship sailed a long time ago. A philosophy department is typically much smaller than a history or an English department, and typically has fewer majors than either of these other two departments. There might be some schools where this is not the case, but I assure you that such places are the exception, not the rule. Just go to a good bookstore and look at the philosophy, history, and literature sections. You'll quickly see which of the three is the smallest section.

In some understandings of the humanities, yes, it's true, philosophy is accorded a central, foundational role, but the actual practice of institutions of higher education relegates philosophy to an increasingly minor role in the intellectual lives of their students (and has been doing so for a long time). The situation has became so bad in recent years that applied ethics has become the fastest growing area within philosophy, as philosophy departments struggle to demonstrate to their deans that they're usefully contributing to the careerist ambitions that today's administrators harbor for today's students.

If what I've just described isn't the case at your institution of higher learning, then I suspect that you're studying or teaching at the University of Paris and Thomas Aquinas is on the faculty.

June 14, 2004

Two former students, both of whom studed Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment with me, have emailed me about this story in The New York Times. It's about a new Canadian documentary called The Corporation. I should say that I haven't seen the film.

The article makes interesting use of Horkheimer & Adorno's book. Here's the first paragraph:

In their 1944 work, ''Dialectic of Enlightenment,'' Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno advanced a theory on the far-reaching power of what they called ''the culture industry.'' This entity, encompassing all forms of mass culture, media and the businesses behind them, made up such a totalizing system that it was literally impossible to rebel against it. This complex not only anticipated the urge to revolt but would sell you something to satisfy it. (Che Guevara T-shirt, anyone?) It's a resoundingly depressing theory but an interesting one to recall, because anticorporate sentiment is lately prominent in pop culture.

The film is said to be the latest example of this anticorporate sentiment. It might be worthwhile, but I haven't yet heard from anyone who has seen it. If it comes to Dallas, then I could see it. My hometown is too small for the local theaters to feature a documentary.

Towards the end of the article there is some fulminating about the possibility of dissent within the confines of the culture industry. As far as I'm concerned, this wasn't one of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's major concerns. They were more worried about the transformation of autonomous art (as they labeled it) into a form of mere entertainment that is simply an extension of the working day. (That is, to fudge the theory a great deal, we amuse ourselves in the evening to rest up for the next day's labor.) Naturally, that change would have an effect on what people want to read and watch, and, presumably, the political content would usually be low or non-existent.

But since Horkheimer and Adorno never saw the primary purpose of autonomous art in a straightforwardly political light, the absence of dissent in the products of the culture industry isn't their main concern. Many of the greatest works of art have no obvious political content or ambition. Horkheimer and Adorno were well aware of that.

Anyway, I was glad to see discussion of their book turn up in a piece in the The New York Times. I'm currently talking with an editor about writing a monograph on Dialectic of Enlightenment. It's one of my favorite works in 20th century continental philosophy, and no one has ever tried to comment on the book from start to finish. I taught it numerous times over the years, and now I'd like to write something about it.

If you haven't seen Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, then go out and find it. Once you see it, you'll understand why I brought it up in this paragraph, given the overall context of this post.

Acknowledgment: Many thanks to Jonathan Church and Ross Lerner for alerting me to the article in The New York Times.

June 13, 2004

In an earlier post I briefly touched on the issue of anti-Semitism among German philosophers. My basic position is that the anti-Semitism, while it was real, was not embodied in their philosophies. Such a claim requires elaboration and defense, of course. But that's how many philosophers, myself included, view the matter. Scholars from disciplines outside of philosophy are sometimes tempted to see things differently.

I alluded in that earlier post to a notorious passage from Fichte, but I didn't quote it. There's no free-standing translation of the book in question, but his remarks about Jews (a few paragraphs long) are translated and discussed in various places. Besides chapter 8 of Paul Lawrence Rose's Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner, I'd also recommend chapter 5 of Anthony J. La Vopa's Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799 (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

In this post I want to quote a passage from Kant, who is a much more significant thinker than Fichte (as even Fichte scholars would acknowledge), and thus an anti-Semitic observation from him is worth more attention. The remark comes from Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, a manual for a lecture course that Kant gave for nearly thirty years. It was first published as a book in 1798. The passage appears in §46, which is entitled "On Mental Deficiencies in the Cognitive Power" ["Von den Gemüthsschwächen im Erkenntnißvermögen"]:

The Palestinians living among us have, for the most part, earned a not unfounded reputation for being cheaters, because of their spirit of usury since their exile. Certainly, it seems strange to conceive of a nation of cheaters; but it is just as odd to think of a nation of merchants, the great majority of whom, bound by an ancient superstition that is recognized by the State they live in, seek no civil dignity and try to make up for this loss by the advantage of duping the people among whom they find refuge, and even one another. The situation could not be otherwise, given a whole nation of merchants, as non-productive members of society (for example, the Jews in Poland). So their constitution, which is sanctioned by ancient precepts and even by the people among whom they live (since we have certain sacred writings in common with them), cannot consistently be abolished  even though the supreme principle of their morality in trading with us is "Let the buyer beware." I shall not engage in the futile undertaking of lecturing to these people, in terms of morality, about cheating and honesty. Instead, I shall present my conjectures about the origin of this peculiar constitution (the constitution, namely, of a nation of merchants). [Quoted in Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, tr. Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), p. 77.]

Kant then offers his conjectures about the origin of the Jews as a nation of merchants  Palestine, as he puts it, was well-situated for the caravan trade, and so on.

What to say? Well, first, I have to admit to some uncertainty as to how the word Verfassung, which Gregor has translated as "constitution," is to be to understood. Frequently, the German term has a political connotation: that is, a Verfassung can be a constitution, a political document of some sort. But that doesn't seem to be the proper way to understand the term as it is used in this passage. (I'm open, though, to suggestions as to how to read the word in a political sense.)

Instead, Kant seems to mean something like "state of mind" or "mental condition," both of which can plausibly translate Verfassung and make more sense in the context of the overall discussion, which, as the section title indicates, is devoted to the question of mental deficiencies. In the case of the Jews, Kant is attributing to them the mental deficiency of being habitually dishonest. (Don't forget, by the way, his "for the most part" qualifier, which seems to apply to the number of Jews who are cheaters. That is, Kant doesn't seem to be saying that all Jews are dishonest.) I'd say that he's referring to what he takes to be their mental constitution, which, in the context under discussion, amounts to the grievous moral failing of dishonesty, especially in commerce. (I skimmed through the entire text of Kant's Anthropology, but I didn't find any other places where he used the word Verfassung that might help us here. I admit, though, that I could have missed something. I'm blogging here, after all, not writing a scholarly paper.)

Furthermore, he seems to postulate the perpetual existence of this deficiency as long as Jews (1) remain a nation of merchants who (2) reside in non-Jewish countries, (3) make up for their lack of civil dignity (i.e., their second-class citizenship) through dishonest business practices, and (4) abide by ancient religious precepts that sanction their behavior. (Kant doesn't seem to say that their precepts are the cause of the dishonesty that he attributes to the majority of them.) That's why he says that their constitution  or however else we might translate Verfassung  cannot consistently be abolished.

I don't know why Kant wrote this particular remark. No one does, as far as I know. I spend little time condemning the failings, moral or otherwise, of people who are long dead. Such an activity I consider a form of self-righteousness. Kant's remark speaks for itself, and nowadays we know what it says. Let's leave it at that.

The important intellectual consideration is whether or not the remark  which expresses an attitude towards Jews that Kant held at some point in his life  somehow informs his philosophical writings. Since Kant gave his anthropology course many times, we don't know when he penned this remark, nor whether he repeated it every time he gave the course, and thus we don't know for sure whether or not he believed it until the end of his life. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that Kant wholeheartedly believed, throughout his entire life, that the Jews were a nation of cheaters. Does it matter for understanding his philosophy?

Kant's moral philosophy is clearly meant to be universal in scope and application. Therefore, it assigns the same duties and rights to all human beings. Furthermore, according to Kant, the failings of others do not excuse us from our obligations towards them, however sorely they might test our patience. (Two wrongs don't make a right, as the saying goes.) Kant says that he refuses to lecture the Jews about their failings, because he thinks that to do so would be futile. But he does not say that their alleged failings excuse us from our obligations towards them.

Since the observation in the quoted passage is an empirical falsehood, it isn't a consequence of Kant's philosophical views, which are never to be mistaken for empirical generalizations of any sort. That is, what Kant says about the Jews can't be a product of his philosophy. A general condemnation of dishonesty  applied to Jews and non-Jews alike  is to be expected from his moral philosophy, but the sweeping generalization about Jews isn't a philosophical view. It's just an empirical falsehood that expresses a prejudice.

There's nothing in this passage that should prompt any reflection about the nature of Kant's philosophy. For some reason, which no one has been able to fathom, Kant subscribed to one of the ancient stereotypes of the Jewish people. From a personal point of view, clearly, it's lamentable; from a philosophical point of view, however, it's irrelevant.